


keeps me from falling off the Earth

by possibilityleft



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:19:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilityleft/pseuds/possibilityleft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An archaeologist discovers a strange blue box, and keeps digging.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keeps me from falling off the Earth

The Doctor had always had a cantankerous relationship with archaeologists. They tended to dig up things that had been buried for important reasons, or try to murder him, or try to marry him, or disagree with this theories and assessments, even though he had actually been there for the fall of the Roman empire or tripping of the Almighty Emperor of Kanval.

He was no longer around to protest the unearthing of the TARDIS, however. His star had burned out, his personal timeline ended thousands of years before. Of course, given his tendency to travel throughout all of time and space, there were adventures still to come. The universe had not yet died, and somewhere out there, one of his selves was provoking revolution, another giving directions to a lost fleet of colony ships, a third re-reading Shakespeare in an out-of-the-way nebula.

The archaeologist was a dreamer. The Doctor would have liked that much at least. Her "real" job was teaching, although she'd always wanted to lead an excavation. Not too many of those occurred around the small city where she lived. The dead were left to rest.

One of the children she taught had uncovered a corner while digging during recess. As most rocks didn't have corners, the child continued digging. When he had unearthed another few inches of something box-like, he'd come to her and asked her to look.

The archaeologist was intrigued by the dirty box. Nothing so regular existed in nature; it had to be something constructed and later buried. But what? She worried it might be a bomb, lost long ago when the fighting ended. She worried that it was a coffin, even though it seemed to be blue under the dirt.

And she worried more when she touched the edge, and it seemed warm in her hands.

*

She excavated anyway. She was an archaeologist, after all, and once she found the cracks that indicated the edge of a door, she was lost to wonder. She worked on it alone, for the most part. The children got bored as soon as the digging became difficult. She didn't mind, though. Once the calluses formed, it became almost enjoyable.

She worked on it during her free time, so it took quite a while. Once she'd uncovered the whole top, it just brought more questions. There was a light on top, a light crusted with dirt that didn't glow anymore. Who would bury a square box with a light on top?

But at least she didn't think it was a bomb anymore. Her friends teased her about her 'project,' but she didn't mind.

*

The archaeologist eventually hired a truck. She had at first been delicate while digging, careful not to hurt the box. Of course, she made a few slips, and it didn't take long for her to realize that she couldn't damage it. Her shovel might leave the occasional scratch, but it was never even deep enough to leave obvious marks in the paint. The box felt like wood, but clearly it was not.

So, several months after the first discovery, she swallowed her nerves and rented a truck to pull it the rest of the way out of the hole. She'd dug around it as much as possible, but there was no way she could lift it herself. It took longer than she'd expected because she had to figure out the chains and the extra digging, but eventually the truck jerked forward and out it popped. She shut the truck off and went to investigate.

As she had expected, the box was undamaged. It lay on its side, judging by the placement of the doors, crusted with dirt and looking terribly old.

The archaeologist filled in the hole the best she could, left a couple of warning markers for good measure, and called a couple of strong friends, who helped her wrestle the box into the truck.

For lack of a better place, she put it in the garden. It contrasted beautifully with the red flowers surrounding it, and almost seemed to hum when she touched it.

She catalogued the box extensively. She knew that she should really have called the university and gotten a professional, probably months ago when she confirmed that it was man-made. Instead she took notes of her own and cleaned it carefully. She wondered if she could get inside without the missing key. She uncovered the unfamiliar writing, written in a language she had never seen.

And the box continued to feel strange. It vibrated under her hands, and she started having strange dreams. She found herself sleepwalking for the first time in her life, waking sometimes with her fingers tracing the blue wood. She tried everything she could think of to get in, even to the point of attempting to break the hinges or the lock. She didn't have any luck.

The archaeologist woke again, her fingers tracing the white inscription on the front. She pushed once, hard.

The door opened.

*

It was, in one word, marvelous. It was dusty and disused inside, but once it had been beautiful. The broad ceilings, the soft green lighting, the shadowy promise of corridors off of the first huge room - it fascinated her.

"It's bigger on the inside," the archaeologist exclaimed in delight, and the lights brightened just a little.

No matter how far she wandered, there were more corridors. The archaeologist worried that she would get lost and took to carrying a ball of yarn, splaying it behind her as she went. It never lasted as long as she would like.

The halls and rooms were musty and dim. There were bedrooms with clothes laid out for the next day, bathrooms where faucets dripped. There was an empty swimming pool in a mildewed library.

The (other) library was quite a treasure. Full of books in hundreds of languages, and quite a few of them annotated in varying handwritings. Some of the books she could read. But it was even better when she found the holovids and began to learn about the people who had owned this box. They were mostly male, dressed in archaic clothing, and they all bore the same name or title: the Doctor.

The Doctor was fascinating. He'd been everywhere, done everything, and he often had a friend along. They saved planets and butterflies and everything in-between. He was kind and terrible, dangerous and silly.

The archaeologist ached to visit the places that the Doctor had been. She took feverish notes and dreamed about alien skies. She wondered if she could fly this ship, and if anyone would notice if she left.

She wondered if it were real. Perhaps it was all fictional, actors traded out after their run was over. If one person, if one group of people had done so much, why wasn't their name written all over time and space? Why didn't she know it? Why was the box buried in a shallow grave?

She watched the Doctor move, celebrated here, hated there, forgotten now. She laughed when she found the 500-Year Diary, simply because the idea was so absurd. (She knew him well enough by then that she wasn't surprised when she opened it and he'd left off writing after only a couple of months.)

She wrote page after page, taking notes at first, and then telling a story. It seemed like the best way to go about things. Her language didn't have enough tenses for the time travel, but she did the best she could.

It seemed a shame that no one would remember him, or his friends, or the TARDIS. She started telling the stories to the children during literature class, and they loved them.

She began to wonder where he went, and how he'd died that final time, and why he hadn't come back again.

She sent a copy of one of the stories to a writer friend of hers, unsure what he would send in return, or what he would think.

 _I can get this published_ , he sent back. _Are you interested?_

Her hands stilled as she thought. She thought about the Doctor, and what he'd think about the idea (which really depended on the body he was wearing at the time).

She said yes, and her dreams that night were full of golden light. The TARDIS was laughing, pleased. She had been lonely, with her Doctor gone, but now she had a friend.

*

The archaeologist explored, and wrote, and taught. One day, she opened a door right off the console room, and knew that it was meant for her. The bedclothes were her favorite shade of green.

She wasn't sure if she wanted to live in the TARDIS. The Doctor's life was wonderful, but it was also dangerous, and insulating. There were quite a few people who had lost or ruined their lives while traveling with him. Already, she could feel herself changing. She could read the words on the front of the box, although she still wasn't sure what it was _for_. The Doctor wasn't law enforcement. Quite often he was the opposite.

The day that she learned how the Doctor died, she got a call from her writer friend. His publisher wanted everything she had about the Doctor. The publisher would make the archaeologist and the Doctor famous, or so she was told.

The phone call occurred in the afternoon. That morning, the archaeologist was making a cup of tea in the yellow kitchen of the TARDIS. Tucked into the cabinet, behind two mugs, a fork, and a former queen's missing tiara, she found a glowing white box. She touched it, and the her tea was long cold by the time she let go.

He had to tell someone, the box said, a blaze in her mind. She couldn't often understand what the TARDIS was saying because the TARDIS was bad at squeezing herself into four dimensions, but the Doctor was clear as a bell in her mind, and every word he spoke felt like a painful ringing in her head. He was too clear, his voice overwhelming.

He sounded overwhelmed. There was an invasion. There were brilliant humans and a ridiculous plan and his last life, cradled in his hands. The plan hinged on a gambit that might end that life, and he wasn't sure what would happen if he failed. Even if he succeeded, he would probably never see his companions again. But he wasn't hesitating. He just wanted to let people know why he had gone. He left the Earth in humanity's own hands. He left the TARDIS to herself (although he doubted that she'd survive the crash).

The archaeologist had a piercing headache by the time she finished carefully writing down the Doctor's last words. But she wanted to get them right. Someday, other people might be reading them.

Score one for archaeologists, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Resignation" by Nikki Giovanni. Written for [poetry_fiction](http://poetry-fiction.dreamwidth.org/32850.html?thread=74834#cmt74834): with hope we learn that man is more / than the sum of what he does / we also are what we wish we did / and age teaches us / that even that doesn't matter; also written for [fic_promptly](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/158465.html?thread=7238145&format=light#cmt7238145): Doctor Who, author's choice, centuries after the Doctor's final death, the records of the Doctor's many adventures are slowly uncovered.


End file.
